get on the 64bit boat man. Win7 64bit and ableton and max4live 64bit, then shove as much of the fastest ram in as you can.

5400RPM HDD is defo not good enough. You need to get the fastes HDD you can.

One option you could do is to convert your CD drive into a Hard drive slot and stick an SSD in there.

But the cost of doing all of this might end up being the same price as the laptop i bought a few months ago

Samsung NP350E7C. NB comes with Windows 8 64bit and downgrading to Win 7 64bit is not supported for drivers. Saying that Win8 64bit ran fine for me before I downgraded anyway for issues i had with Serato at the time.

Laptop cost me €800 at the time from laptops direct and has 4 usb ports with 8GB RAM